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Interview with MacSoft's Al SchillingBy: Bill Stiteler Date: December 4, 2000
If the average Mac gamer were to flip over his CD jewel cases and read the back, chances are that a good majority of them would be emblazoned with the MacSoft logo. Over the past couple of years, the Minnesota based company has been responsible for bringing to the Mac many A-list titles such as Falcon 4.0, Rainbow Six, and Unreal Tournament, and more recently a slew of family oriented titles like Scrabble, Wheel of Fortune and the soon to published Monopoly. I recently had the opportunity to visit the MacSoft headquarters where I sat down to speak with production manager Al Schilling. Bill Stiteler: So what's coming up from MacSoft? Al Schilling: For the holidays, we've got lots of great titles for the Macintosh. We've got Risk II, which just shipped recently; Scrabble hasn't been out very long, it's a great holiday gift; Monopoly is in production now, it should be on the shelves within a week or so; we just released Beach Head 2000, a real fun arcade-type game; Rouge Spear we're just wrapping up, we're in final beta stage right now and going for approval of a final candidate later this week. We'll have that on the shelves by Christmas. We've got a boatload of product coming out. Bill: With more and more console games coming out, do you see the focus of MacSoft in particular or PC gaming in general heading towards more "family" releases like Monopoly and Scrabble and then the occasional big release like Unreal Tournament. Al: I'm not sure that that's where the line's going to be drawn between family-friendly, consumer-type games. There are certain types of games which lend themselves really well to console play. I think you'll see more of a shift to those staying on the console; sports games, for instance, where a limited number of buttons works well with the parameters of the control. But I think not only will you see the family-friendly on the PC and Mac, but you'll see the Civilization-type games that require a lot of keyboard input, I think you'll see those stay on the PC and Mac. Bill: What the process of deciding what games to port? It seems like every time I go online there's a new petition that says, "We want this game...right now!" Al: Short of throwing darts at a board... (Laughter.) Bill: Do you pay any attention to online petitions? Al: Sure, anything that comes my way. Like I said before, the absolute favorite part of my job is to go out and meet with user groups, to get that one-on-one feedback. Just because there's a petition doesn't mean we'll do a game, but it certainly can alert us to a title that we didn't have on our radar screen, or that we didn't think would be so popular. Bill: Popularity obviously has something to do with it, but (to get a contract) do you go into a bidding process, or do you have relationships with certain companies? Al: We do have relationships with certain companies. The one that's going really strong with us is our relationship with Hasbro; our relationship with Red Storm; we've done some things with Activision. That doesn't mean that we're the only people that can do deals with them. We don't have any kind of agreement to that effect. But once you get that trust, that working relationship going, it's much easier to continue dealing with those same companies. As to what makes a game that we want to port, that's kind of changed over time. Bill: How so? Al: Well, a couple of years ago, we would basically look at the PC charts, and if a game was on the top five there, that seemed like a pretty good target to port. Or if it was selling like 500,000 units on the PC, that seemed like it would be a good port for Mac. And that was kind of reactive on our part; we're trying to be a bit more proactive now. The Mac market is getting an identity now, where it didn't really have one back then. The iMac is obviously the family-type machine, and with about four million of those out there, there's a pretty good installed base for family-type entertainment. That's why over the last six months MacSoft has kind of shifted a lot of its focus into that. At the same time, we're trying to hang onto the hardcore gamer, too, with games like Rouge Spear, and we're working on Vampire: The Masquerade: Redemption. So we're not abandoning that, but we definitely see an opening in the market for good family-friendly games. So it used to be just straight numbers, and now we're trying to get in the mindset of the Mac audience and the actual demographic of who the Mac people are, and that's a little better defined than they were two years ago... Bill: What games do you like to play? Al: That's a hard question to answer. Since we're working on so many titles, I keep having to switch from one, to the next, to the next, and I can't stay with one game for very long. I really enjoyed Scrabble, when we were doing that. I didn't think I would enjoy it so much, but the mini-games in it and stuff actually made me a better player. I loved Driver. Beach Head 2000 was fun for me--I go back to the old arcade days. I played Space Invaders when Space Invaders was cool. I dumped untold hundreds of dollars into Pac-Man machines, and got to where I was collecting gold bars, playing for half an hour on a quarter. I had a lot of fun with Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, that we're working on; I love watching the game shows and things like that. As for games that (MacSoft) doesn't make, I play Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and my kids are hooked on The Sims. Bill: As a product manager, what is your role? Al: People outside the company I don't think really understand how small a unit MacSoft is. There are currently four full-time employees of MacSoft. We outsource a lot of our programming to companies, great companies like Varcon, Westlake, Metis International. But that leaves an awful lot of work to be done here. Aside from the standard product manager duties, which would be: I get the source code, I determine who's going to port the product, try to work out an agreement for that, and then arrange for beta testing of the product, to file QA approval on that, make sure marketing has all the assets they need as far as screen shots and things like that, review all the documentation to make sure that the manuals and things are all in order before we go to press... Those are the standard things a product manager does. Being that we are such a small group, I get a little extra. I get to go out and develop the relationships that bring us these titles, so I'll go out and actually talk to Hasbro or Activision, and try to acquire those properties. The absolute favorite part of my job is that I get to deal with user groups, so I get to travel out to trade shows like MacWorld. Bill: When you don't have an established relationship with a company, what do you have to do to convince them to allow a port? Al: They all have the same concern; no one wants the development for what they consider to be their key platform to be hindered in any way. The first thing you have to do is overcome that hurdle that (the Mac port) is going to slow them down. We have a really good track record, that companies can give us the source code, and we're not going to bother them any more. We may come back with a list of questions, but even that will be a comprehensive list; it'll be one time. The second thing is that, with a company like Hasbro that has licenses like Monopoly and Scrabble, which are very important to them, we need to convince them that we're going to do an absolutely top-notch quality job with the product. Fortunately we have a history of that here at MacSoft, which speaks well of the people here and the people we work with. Bill: A criticism I'll see from time to time is that when a game is ported is that it's "barely a Mac game," or that the "interface isn't Mac-like." Al: There are interfaces that are obviously PC. And some interfaces that I would say don't really tie to any one platform. What people need to understand is that we don't always have control over that interface. Basically, we're porting a game, and what we're charged with is bringing that game to the Mac almost exactly like it was on the PC. Where we can make improvements, we certainly do, but to completely redesign an interface would one, make it very difficult for us to get approval from the original developer, because they've designed the interface a certain way for a certain reason; and two, it would add a lot of cost and time to the development. Bill: What's the biggest change or challenge you have when you're working on a port? Al: There are a lot of them, really. It depends on how the original game was written. It was written in really competent C++ code, our programmers love it... it makes it fairly easy. But if a game is say, written in Direct 3D and DirectPlay items, it makes it much more difficult. It's obviously easier for us to port a game written in OpenGL. It depends on the state of the PC game. Bill: How's the support from Apple? Al: The relationship is great. They're very willing to help out their developers. If we need help, it's a phone call away; we always get a response. We're premiere members (of the Apple Developer's Group), which affords us access to their compatibility labs from time to time. Do we always agree with every choice Apple makes? No. But are they willing to explain it to us and try to help work through any issues that may cause us? Yes. Bill: How do you think OSX will affect Mac gaming? Al: Initially there are going to be some pickups, you know, getting old games to run in the Classic environment in X. In the long run, X gives us all the underpinnings of a modern OS. Bill: We have things like GameSprockets, OpenGL, and video cards; what's the next thing that Apple needs to acquire for better gaming? Al: I don't see anything earth-shattering. Currently there's no force-feedback API, and for some of the racing games and stuff to really come full force, I think force feedback would be a good thing. Bill: So have we achieved some kind of parity? Al: OpenGL is still evolving... I can't say that we're 100% caught up, but we've just made a quantum leap over the last year. Bill: Have you had much dealings with LucasArts? There's the perception that for whatever reason, they're reluctant to let people do ports of their products. Al: None, and I was kind of surprised to see that they let Aspyr do Monkey Island. So hopefully that means that they're interested in bringing more products to Mac. Bill: Was it that they wouldn't meet with anyone, or that it didn't seem right at the time... Al: It wasn't somebody we had attempted to talk to, so I'm not sure. Bill: What makes a game a good fit for MacSoft? Al: Right now we've really been focusing on the family friendly thing. I spend a lot of time reading the trade publications, trying to figure out not just what's out there, but what's coming that would be a good fit for the Macintosh people. Bill: Has there been a title that you wanted to get but didn't? Al: Yes. I really wanted The Sims. Bill: Is it getting easier to be able to port games? Al: Yes. A lot of people want to play in the Macintosh space right now, and they know that they don't know how to do it. Most companies that are making games, I think, have in the back of their minds, "Hey, maybe we could do this for the Mac." We used to go knocking on a lot of people's doors, and now we have a lot of people knocking on ours. Bill: What do you think it would take to get more concurrent releases? Al: One thing that would help, but that I don't see happening, would be Macintosh version of the tools like DirectPlay, all the DirectX tools. If that were to happen, it would make porting a snap. I don't see that happening. I think we're closer to concurrent releases, simply because there's more people competing for the Mac gaming dollar, and the customers are going to demand that. By virtue of the marketplace, we're going to do something to keep the customers coming to MacSoft. And that means, mostly for Triple-A titles, getting closer to concurrent releases. So if a deal's going forward, maybe we'll spend a little more money to get the developer to work on both (Mac and PC), or give us the source code so we can be working on it. Unreal Tournament is a good example of that. Even though Westlake was doing the Mac development and Epic was doing the PC development, which was a difficult situation, Westlake did a great job on that. Bill: In terms of hardware, what would make the Mac a better gaming machine? Al: Well, they already took step one; the round mouse was a horrible gaming device, so they had to get rid of that. I think a lot of gamers cry for multi-button mice, which fortunately are available from third parties, but OSX will have support for multi-button mice built in. But as far as peripherals go, I mean, Apple's really bridged the gap with USB. Bill: How difficult would it be to go into a place where you know they're developing a game you want and do a concurrent release, or do you prefer to wait and see... Al: If they don't want to do absolute concurrent development, then we need to wait until they're somewhere in a first playable, where they're locking in the features. Otherwise what we've found is that we'll get six months into a game that they're, say, eight months into, and they keep sending us the code once a month, and then all of a sudden they'll say "You know what, we don't like the way this is going, so we're going to start over from here." Then we've got three or four months of development that's been wasted, and we simply can't afford to do that. People have the idea, I think, that software companies are just raking in money hand over fist, and that's just not the case. And as much as I would like to just throw as much money as possible into a product and have it come out the week after the PC version, it's just not possible. Until they get to the point where they have the features pretty much locked, and then start looking at it, and porting the code, so in the few months when they go final candidate, we can be almost caught up. And that works more for us right now. Bill: With MacPlay back and Gathering of Developers, Mac gaming is certainly in a better place that it was a few years ago. Why do you think that is? Al: Sure. I think that a number of companies have noticed the success of the few companies that have stayed with the Mac gaming business or that jumped in even when it didn't look like maybe a great time, like Aspyr jumped into the Mac gaming business. They see that we're having some success, that a couple of other companies are having success, and then they see the turnaround at Apple and the incredible success of machines like the iMac. And they want a piece of that. And I can't say I blame them; it's been very good for us.
Miscellaneous fun facts about MacSoft:
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